Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling?

There’s a lot of talk about how AI shifted the job market away from junior roles, but companies had already removed the management capacity for them.

Re: Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

#5

Post by rvz » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

> If you work in tech, your manager might still care about your career. They just might not have enough time to do much about it.

Narrator: They never did.

It is a free-for-all office politics game and it is your own responsibility and no-one else for your 'career' and it affects ALL levels from junior to senior staff.

Re: Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

#6

Post by hankbond » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

It's very unlikely that your manager has any real organizational incentive to care about your career. It's rare for direct-report-career-growth to be more than one line item near the bottom of the list that they are being evaluated on. Across all of my jobs I've only had one manager that was interested, some even seemed to actively get in the way.

Re: Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

#7

Post by hankbond » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

> To help guard against discussion about career growth getting lost entirely, Spellbook conducts annual and midyear reviews of its employees, Stevenson said. That allows for "really deep conversation" about workers' careers and how to level up and advance, he said.

I have never had a "really deep conversation" about my career at a mid/full year review. Often, that's where I get feedback about something that happened months ago I was unaware my manager thought needed improvement.

The in-the-trenches feedback mentioned in the article would be an improvement over the lack-of-any feedback.

All of my favorite roles were actually not ones with the most interesting technical challenges, they were the ones where I felt like I had real leverage I could wield through my manager. If you want to get anything meaningful done, you need buy-in from leadership, and it's very difficult to get that when your manager is not on-board.

Re: Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

#8

Post by conorcleary » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

Never did; they only really care about theirs.

Re: Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

#9

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 10:56 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #3

Your career is your own responsibility. It isn’t your manager’s responsibility.

A manager that does not care about the careers of the people on their team is not a good manager

If you care about being a good manager you should care about building your teams careers

Re: Why your boss doesn't seem to care about your tech career anymore

#10

Post by entrepy123 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

dannyboland wrote: post #4

Bleak. This flat and fast structure assumes that ICs are all senior devs, able to be largely autonomous. Who supports the junior engineer who is struggling? There’s a lot of talk about how AI shifted the job market away from junior roles, but companies had already removed the management capacity for them.

Is there a newer 'be autonomous' culture? Or did I just grow up a bit?

10-20 years ago people would love to talk about technical topics. Ask help, give help, offer pointers, debate merits.

Now I guess we ask AI, figure it out ourselves, and/or grin and bear it?

What happened? Is it from remote work? Or everything's easy now? Or nobody wants to stick their neck out? Time constraints? Knowledge gaps?

I don't struggle, exactly, but I run up into all kinds of situations where there's no obvious best choice (everything's awesome and everything is too limited all at once), so either some tough choices need to be made or maybe there IS a better way but it's just VERY non-documented or too much of a PITA to do right away (or simply, silo'd and well-protected).

There ARE avenues to get things done. There ARE multiple valid channels to ask or follow up in. The answer is basically: do it, don't ask. And yet...

GIVEN an culture/expectation/want to be "autonomous" (heck that's what agents need to be, mostly), I think something is missing.

It's like people learned somewhere "be independent", "be autonomous", "don't require help" as somehow "virtuous" outside of the "normal" bounds.

Am I the only one noticing this? Or did something shift?